Hi, I’m a web design virgin! Just enrolled onto a web design course at college for beginners. I’m 25 and seeking a new career, as I have been between jobs for a while now!
I’m looking for help in relation to career progression after completing my basic course. Are there any other relevant courses that I can enrol on? Any relevant reading material? I’m really hoping to eventually gain a job in web development and want to gain as much experience and knowledge as possible. I have a full time job, but can dedicate plenty of hours to study and research! Any info would be much appreciated.
As long as you love doing web design, you’ll do great in this field. Please keep in mind that Web Design and Web Development are two separate things. So, you may want to find out which sub-fields in Web that you like to be in. In your school, I would take some front-end tech and back-end.
Apart from following xhtmlcoder’s good advice the best way to learn is to dive in and make a site for yourself and learn as you go. You will make mistakes and encounter problems along he the way but that’s the way to learn - once you solve a problem you’ll have learnt it!
It depends upon where you see yourself after the course and your current skill-sets. For example, are you currently any at good graphic design or programming. It also depends upon which country you live in as to what courses are available.
Plus it will help if you hang around the forums observing conversation in the Web Page Design sections as you’ll see some of the real-world problems that occur, and how they get solved, which will build up your experience too.
Agreed, don’t put all of your effort into education, the fact is that there isn’t a standardised course on web design that will equip you for everything you’ll need (in career and experience levels) - you need to think about what direction you wish to go (what type of design / development you want to do as a career). If you want to get into the job, start building websites, learn from books, blogs, forums, websites (etc) and experimentation and as you gather knowledge and experience you’ll become more confident and thereby be able to build up a portfolio of projects (and thereby encourage paying clients to want to work with you).
I’m new to it really, used computers alot at college and uni but I’ve always been interested and need advice as to where’s best to start and courses to enrol onto. As I said I’m already on a web design one, but just want peoples advice that are already in the game. Thanks
